The present invention relates in general to software engineering and, more particularly, to a computer simulation for measuring energy dissipation in a cell.
A computer simulation is a useful step during the design of an electronic circuit to test the various features and behavior of the circuit before a physical embodiment is built. One circuit simulator is known as ENTICE which automates a previously tedious, difficult and error-prone process of determining circuit parameter reaction to various input stimuli. The circuit may be mathematically modeled in the computer simulator whereby the design parameters may be verified or manipulated to work out the inevitable problems associated with different embodiments before proceeding with the cost and effort of building an actual hardware model. The simulator generates a pre-defined library of models for transistor level characteristics such as timing and propagation delay. When the circuit under simulation includes a large number of transistors and other electrical components, the user may group transistors into functional blocks known as cells. Thus, the designer may work at a higher level with these functional cell blocks.
One important design characteristic is the energy dissipation by the cell under simulation under a variety of operating conditions. Understanding the energy dissipation model of each cell is necessary to plan the overall energy requirements of the design. In the prior art, energy dissipated has been characterized at the transistor level. Transistor level characterization techniques become time consuming and inefficient when the function blocks under simulation contain a substantial number of transistors.
Hence, a need exists for high level modeling of energy dissipation in the cell under simulation especially when the cell includes multiple outputs.